Social policy in Northern Ireland offers examples of social policies strongly influenced by ideological considerations. There are a number of factors which determine how susceptible services and policies are to ideological influences. Some services are particularly sensitive to ideological values and demands, for example, education. In certain areas the distribution of services and the allocation of resources has been significant in maintaining the political structure. The distribution of administrative responsibility, the absence of pressure from Britain for maintaining parity in social services, and the absence of non-secretarian pressures on the government are other significant factors. The process of analysing problems and formulating social policy reflects deep ideological divisions. This can be contrasted with the rational, empirical and pragmatic models of policy making, implicit in the development of social policy in Britain. With some minor modifications the British model of the Welfare State operates in Northern Ireland. In some areas it operates to serve ends other than those of redistribution or meeting social need. This provides insights into some of the assumptions made about social policy and the Welfare State in Britain.

This paper takes as its subject the explanation of social policy development through the use of comparative data. It is based upon the book by Piven and Cloward entitled Regulating the Poor, published in 1972. This book has been both dismissed too lightly and adopted too uncritically. While the thesis of the book may be somewhat over-simplified it nevertheless points to a range of important issues in social policy and exposes a number of assumptions. As well as evaluating Piven's and Cloward's general perspective this paper looks, in particular, at three themes. These are the relationship between social policy and social control, the relationship between work and welfare and lastly the relationship between power and poverty.

Two-parent families with dependent children are known to be at lower risk of poverty and significantly less reliant on state financial help than lone-parent households. It might therefore be expected that the factors influencing partnership transitions among low-income women would represent a key area of policy interest. However, driven by concerns about weak work incentives, policy focus and research has to date concentrated on understanding lone parents’ labour supply and encouraging the transition from benefits into employment. Surprisingly little is therefore known about demographic decision making among women reliant on UK means-tested welfare. As part of a wider qualitative study exploring family formation, partnership dissolution and repartnering decisions among low-income mothers, this paper examines whether and to what extent entitlement to welfare benefits or tax credits influenced the decision to live with or apart from a partner or child's father. The research found that the aspects of welfare that remove or reduce a mother's access to an independent income and require one partner in a couple to be financially dependent on the other had been strongly influential in partnering decisions and living arrangements. Policy implications are discussed.

Issues such as caring and family policy have received increased attention within the sociological literature on the welfare state during the past decades. At the same time, there has been much debate about the protection of social risks. In particular, scholars have questioned the ability of welfare states to respond to so-called new social risks, such as reconciling work and care. The literature on new social risks assumes welfare states will have difficulty addressing these risks due to pressures for reform and assumed individual responsibility for new social risks. In contrast, the Dutch welfare state has been successful in re-orienting existing institutions to develop a semi-collectivised yet market-driven form of childcare policy. Using qualitative interview data and document analysis, this article analyses the development of Dutch childcare policy from 1995 to 2009. The development of childcare policy is attributed to three social mechanisms: a common perception among actors viewing childcare as a solution to improve women's employment; a party politics mechanism, which creates a distinct Dutch approach to childcare; and a corporatist mechanism, referring to the interaction between the state and industrial relations, which failed in the area of childcare policy. The development of childcare policy has not been wholly unproblematic, however, and therefore a critical discussion of these developments is offered. Also, an update of policy developments through to 2013 is provided.

In 2012, the Government invited local councils in England to participate in a pilot programme to test direct payments in residential care. While the programme was set up to allow for comprehensive summative evaluation, the uptake of direct payments in residential care was substantially lower than anticipated, with only 40 people in receipt of one at the end of the programme. Drawing on qualitative data collected for the evaluation, this paper aims to understand better the barriers to implementing direct payments in residential care. Evidence from the use of direct payments in domiciliary care identified gatekeeping by council frontline staff as a major barrier for service users to access direct payments. Our findings suggest that, whilst selectivity of both service users and providers was an integral part of the programme design, gatekeeping does not fully explain the poor take-up. Other factors played a part, such as lack of clarity about the benefits of direct payments for care home residents, the limited range and scope of choice of services for residents, and concerns from care providers about the financial impact of direct payments on their financial sustainability.

Austerity is frequently associated with crisis-enabled spending cuts. What happens when the crisis is over? This article’s original contribution lies in its in-depth exploration of one mechanism that help explain austerity’s endurance post-crisis, when state elites face increased popular resistance and pressure to reinstate social spending. This mechanism calls attention to the role of economists in Central Budgeting Offices as agents of technocratization and de-politicization within social policy domains. These economists may institute an austere spending mode by changing social spending’s norms and instruments. To demonstrate economists’ role in mediating macroeconomic fiscal goals and social policy design over time, the article examines the development of child welfare policy in Israel before, during and in the aftermath of economic crisis. In this case, austerity attained hegemony when economists were able to delegitimize and shelve an ‘irresponsible’ social spending proposal – and in response to post-crisis demands for compensation – introduce an austere policy instrument to cap social spending during a period of social policy expansion. This analysis suggests that scholars regard relations between austerity and social spending as dialectical.

The post-war Labour Government has often been criticized for its failure to remove the means test from social security. Labour ministers, however, had no reason to anticipate the problems which were later to arise in the administration of means tested social assistance. The experience of the supplementary pension scheme during the war had indicated that there would be few problems of take-up or stigma if old people were required to claim assistance as a supplement to their pensions. Furthermore, the abolition of the household means test in 1941 was believed to have removed the cause of much of the bitterness surrounding the means test in the 1930s. A further, crucial, point is that the assistance scale was not seen as a poverty line, but was believed to provide more than a bare subsistence income. Indeed, the recent opening of the official records of the period has revealed that the 1948 scale was not based upon the subsistence diets calculated by Beveridge, and the comparisons which have often been made between the benefits rates proposed by Beveridge and those introduced in 1948 are of little value, whatever price index is used to express the Beveridge figures in 1948 prices.

Carers make a considerable contribution to the health and social care of sick or disabled people, reducing the strain on health and social care systems. This has been recognised through support mechanisms, including (in the UK) a payment for caring (Carer's Allowance – CA). This article draws upon data from a study of carers receiving CA. Utilising a citizenship perspective, it examines respondents’ perspectives on their role in the UK and shows how CA provides not only financial support but also contributes to normative conceptualisations of citizenship. The data highlight the primacy of paid work in UK citizenship, as well as the stigma associated with receiving welfare benefits. The article concludes by claiming that changes to the UK benefit system need to take into account a ‘recognition’ aspect, reformulating what is considered a worthwhile contribution to society.

All social services are rationed, yet the effects of such rationing on the client are rarely fully explored. This article reviews the evidence on the existence of informal rationing devices in general practice. It examines the effects on patients of a wide range of informal rationing devices now used by individual general practitioners. Various suggestions for reforming the present rationing of primary medical care are evaluated and the likelihood of any reform being carried out is assessed. Although this article concentrates solely on rationing in the primary care sector of the National Health Service, the issues discussed are relevant to most welfare agencies as they are presently organized.

The cross-national works of development sociologists and of political scientists have sought to disentangle some of the determinants of welfare, whereas studies in comparative social policy have been mainly evaluative. These have laid themselves open to charges of being, variously, a-theoretical, unsystematic and narrowly focused on the state sector. However, a case is made here for the continuation of such studies with a clear focus on social policy rather than the mixed economy of welfare, using more explicit evaluative criteria and a range of methods. A small comparative study of social security benefit levels in Australia, Britain and the USA is used as an illustration of the potential in this approach and the problems of method involved.

There has been growing academic and practitioner interest in the problems of and opportunities for joint working in the care of mentally handicapped people. The paper outlines alternative methods of such joint working and tests these against survey and case study evidence. Attention is drawn to the danger that joint working may have little impact at patient level and the paper recommends an emphasis on the appointment of frontline key workers.

The recent discussion of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme in Britain in terms of the unfavourable demographic position early next century has highlighted how little attention is normally paid by British politicians and social policy analysts to population size and structure. Further, the attention is normally confined to the question of how policy should adapt to demographic change, rather than how to modify it, although Britain has an implicit policy of restricting family size. Britain is not alone in this but many countries show more concern about the future of their population and some wish to increase it. Among these is France. This article compares Britain and France: first, over the priority given to demographic issues by statesmen and academics; and second, over the advantages and problems seen in different demographic futures. It argues that family policy needs to be seen in a demographic context.

It is often argued that there are significant differences in the costs of providing public and non-public services. However, these arguments have almost invariably been based on crude comparisons of bald expenditure figures of rather dubious validity. In this paper we describe and apply a conceptual framework which attempts to place such inter-sectoral comparisons on a more reliable basis. Our application is to day care services for elderly people provided by local authority social services departments, area health authorities and voluntary organizations, although the framework has much wider relevance. Our results provide clear evidence to refute the oft-made assumption that voluntary services are universally cheaper than their statutory counterparts. Standardizing costs for the dependency characteristics of users and the activities of day units, we find that voluntary-statutory cost differences are dependent upon the scale of operation. Small voluntary units certainly enjoy a cost advantage, but larger voluntary units are unlikely to be cheaper, and are probably more expensive, than local authority units of a similar scale.

British debates on citizenship often start from an examination of the important work of T.H. Marshall (1950). This paper is no exception. It is argued that Marshall confuses ‘rights’ and ‘opportunities’ within his notion of civil rights. This critique is then developed in terms of Titmuss' concept of the ‘social division of welfare’ so as to distinguish different routes to welfare in old age. A distinction is made between a civil opportunity route to occupational pensions and a social rights route to a state earnings related pension. This distinction is then elaborated to tease out some social class and gender dimensions of citizenship and inequality in old age from a life course perspective.

This article uses John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework as an analytical tool to consider how the policy issue of ‘job quality’, in the guises of ‘decent work’ and ‘fair work’, developed a ‘career’ in Scotland between 2013 and 2017. The aim is to understand why, despite the efforts of a variety of policy entrepreneurs and the openness of the Scottish Government to this policy problem, job quality did not arrive on the Scottish Government’s decision agenda. The article finds that the crucial ‘policy window’ did not open due to the 2016 ‘Brexit’ decision dramatically changing the political landscape.

The article demonstrates the applicability of Kingdon’s framework for agenda-setting analysis in a parliamentary environment and constitutes a rare application of the framework to a ‘live’ policy issue.

The authors were involved in a research and advocacy project on ‘decent work’ that was undertaken in Scotland during 2015 and 2016 and therefore were amongst the policy entrepreneurs seeking to place job quality on the Scottish Government’s agenda.

This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl's most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial.

Child protection is considered an appropriate government responsibility, but interventions into the family are also some of the most consequential for states. This study examines the normative basis for limiting parents’ freedom by exploring public attitudes about a child’s safety in the context of increasing risk. Using a randomized survey, we test the causal relationship between levels of risk and parental restrictions on representative samples in Norway and CA, US (n = 2148) – different welfare state and child protection models. Findings suggest that the public supports restricting parental freedom under conditions of risk and that severity of risk is taken into consideration. A majority favour restricting parental freedom under conditions of risk to the child; a minority resist restricting freedom, regardless of risk, and about one-third to one-half of respondents favour temporarily suspending parents’ rights by separating children to foster care. Residents of Norway are half as likely to support unrestricted parenting, regardless of risk, and are 1.5 as likely to endorse restricted parenting. Norwegians are also 20% less likely to support separating a child from his parent compared to US respondents. The study has implications for system design based on popular notions about parents’ freedom and family privacy.

The EU and OECD’s use of poverty lines set at a percentage of national average income is testimony to the widespread acceptance of Peter Townsend’s purely relative poverty definition. It has often been defended, including by Townsend, as a development of Adam Smith’s reference to ‘necessaries’ differing across social contexts. This article contends that Townsend’s definition is clearly inconsistent with Smith’s work but entirely consistent with a passage by Wilhelm Schulz which established the term ‘relative poverty’ and asserted that people’s material needs are proportionate to their nation’s economic output per head; Karl Marx quoted that passage in a short piece that criticised Smith. A recent defence of Townsend’s definition is its supposed international public endorsement in empirical studies of socially perceived necessities. A review of this evidence finds that publics, like Smith and British poverty researchers before Townsend – most notably Seebohm Rowntree – see the extent of material need as affected by social context but not proportionate to national average income. Publishing purely relative and absolute purchasing power poverty statistics together offers a way of portraying hardship levels that is balanced to reflect publics’ more narrowly relative understanding of material needs.

This article investigates whether equity is achieved in health service utilisation by children and young people aged 0–19 years. Data from the British General Household Survey 1991–4 is used to examine the influence of ethnicity, along with social class, housing tenure, family structure and employment of parents on the use of general practitioner, outpatient and inpatient services. Health status is the most powerful predictor of use for each health service and there is no evidence of socioeconomic inequalities. However, a clear ‘ethnic paradox’ persists after controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors. South Asian children have a higher utilisation of GP services than any other ethnic group, but the use of hospital services is lower for children in all minority ethnic groups relative to the white population. Possible explanations for this paradox are examined in relation to indirect indicators of service quality. There is no evidence to suggest that South Asian children visit the doctor more frequently for a given illness episode than white children, but having a non-UK- born mother is associated with increased consultation and reduced use of outpatient services relative to UK-born South Asian parents.